Daniela and I spent 3 days in Ashland visiting her parents and stealing their furniture. The plan was to tow the furniture back to Vegas, and we even came close to getting a trailer hitch installed on the Hyundai. What derailed our plans was checking the Hyundai owner's manual and finding out that the car was incapable of towing that much weight (the U-Haul trailer was 850 pounds, but U-Haul required a car capable of pulling 2,000 pounds to ensure safe operation. Our car could pull 1,000 pounds and only when everyone in the car was behind it, pushing). So we packed up as much furniture as we could fit into the car and decided to buy the rest in Las Vegas.
The ride down was long. When I say "we were in the car for 14 hours," that doesn't really convey to you how long 14 hours in a car is. It's long. Really long. We left Ashland at 10:30am and got to Vegas by 12:30am the next day.
Here's a video of us before our asses fell asleep and we wanted to die:
Gas was surprisingly cheap. We left Ashland with a full tank of gas and only had to fill it back up twice. Once for $37 and again for $21. Had we rented a U-Haul truck (which gets 10 miles to the gallon) it would have cost us the GNP of Malta.
We had some car problems but powered through them. Maybe it was because we had the tires on the car changed before we left Ashland, but the car wouldn't stop shaking. I told Daniela not to worry about it when we were still close to Ashland (I thought the roads were just bad) but by the time we were at Sacramento it was clear something was wrong with the car. Much more worrisome was that the car kept losing engine power or something. I can't describe it well. At random intervals, it seemed like Daniela took her foot off the gas pedal when she hadn't, and the car would begin to slow down. Then, after about a second, it would power back on and the car would surge forward. This may have happened every 45 minutes or so. The only time it was a problem was when we were stopped at an intersection or traffic light. If we were stopped, the car would just die. Daniela was convinced that the car would die while we were going 80mph and that she would lose control of the car and kill us. Didn't happen.
Other than our car problems the trip was uneventful. We got in to Vegas around midnight and just crashed. OH! We stopped at a diner in Westley, California and there were those peg games on every table. I'm referring to that game where you have 15 holes and 14 pegs and you're supposed to leave one peg remaining by jumping over other pegs. The highest score you can get at that game is by leaving 8 pegs on the board without any further jumps possible. So I worked backwards to figure it out but solved it by the time I finished my biscuits and gravy. 200 Point Genius. Mark it, Dude.
